Recent readings that I enjoyed!

Grass Roof, Tin Roof by Dao Strom. This book was hard-hitting for me, emotionally. Immigration, war, family - all difficult, sticky topics and the author pulled them off fantastically. It's so alive and intimate, the prose like music.

The police officers had had to track me down through a web of excuses my friends and I had set up in order to go out dancing; in smugly reprimanding tones, they told me this. The drive to the hospital took forty-five minutes. I arrived still wearing my cat's-eye makeup - exaggerated rings of black eyeliner - and black lipstick, and my black clothes felt garish under the glare of the fluorescent lights. I thought: onlookers will say the teenage daughter knew all along, was waiting every day for the mother's end to come, was celebrating death, even. Just look at her!

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. This isn't SFF but I'd say it is decidedly speculative!
Otherwise I'm still trying to catch up on short fiction - so not all of these were published in 2013 and eligible for awards, but their writers have published in 2013 and definitely eligible for short story categories, the Campbell, or both.

E. Catherine Tobler's 'You Were She Who Abode'  (Clarkesworld, 2012) reminds me a little of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha, being about a woman soldier, war, and PTSD. No bugs, though!

A.C. Wise's 'Her Last Breath Before Waking Up' (Three-Lobed Burning Eye, 2013) is striking magic-realism! It's about an architect, a doomed love affair, and forgetting. This is eligible for awards in the short story category.

Veronica Schanoes' 'Burning Girls' (Tor.com, 2013) is hard to categorize but if I'd encountered it outside Tor.com I would've said it was from a literary lineage - though it can still be that, naturally! Immigration and family and demons.

I became familiar with Sofia Samatar through sharing a TOC with her, and her 'Honey Bear' (Clarkesworld, 2012) really stuck with me - the way it is about motherhood, about saying yes, about persevering in a post-apocalyptic world. She's got many eligible stories in 2013, the novel A Stranger in Olondria, and is in her second year of Campbell eligibility.

What I loved reading in 2013

I'm going to have to refrain from gushing about Ancillary Justice again because I think it's becoming obsessive of me to do so - but suffice to say that I've bought multiple copies for friends! That is how much I loved it. *_*



Lavie Tidhar's The Violent Century! I'm not familiar with the history side of things - this being alternate history, that spells a lack on my part - but the *writing*. I don't think it's often I get to read something so intense, so indelible, and breathless. It's such visual visual text and incredibly different. In an interview, Lavie said it underwent several conceptual revisions, having been conceived at various points as screenplay and comics.

On the short fiction end of things, I discovered Seth J. Dickinson's writing this year starting with The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds, a heartbreaking tragedy, tautly and richly made - I don't think anyone I have recommended this to didn't love it; I believe he has a novel taking place before this story and I hope to see that out someday. More this-yearly, his 'Never Dreaming (In Four Burns)' is just as wrenching but ends on a *slightly* happier note. Women rocket scientists! Magic *and* hard science!

'The Long Road to the Deep North' was my favorite story from Lavie this year, not an easy choice to make when he's published more than twenty! I hear that he sleeps... sometimes. But it's a wonderfully engaging story, brilliantly smart, with the way it speculates on the future of languages and poetics.



Is there anybody who's not read Yoon Ha Lee yet? 'The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars' is so stunning, isn't it? Yoon Ha Lee is how I got started writing space opera, possibly one of my biggest writing influences this year.

Why not more space opera! What a coincidence as well that two of my favorite reads this year have spaceships in human bodies - although hugely differently: 'The Waiting Stars' is, like much of Aliette's fiction, complex and haunting, and it's about memory and forgetting, two of my favorite themes.

Lastly, whimsical time travel playing with history! 'Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken' by Elizabeth Ziemska. I do so adore it.